The Sacred Heart of Jesus
June is the month of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, when the Church invites us to respond to His unbounded love for us, encountered above all in the most holy Sacrament of the altar.
'You are not your own: you were bought with a price,' wrote St Paul to the people of Corinth, and it is this purchase of ourselves that we celebrate in the Holy Eucharist. The word 'redeem' is often trivialized in common speech, and we need to remember that our redemption is a matter of the extreme pain, degradation and death suffered by Our Blessed Lord in His Passion; they are set against the death of the soul and the self-destruction which we bring upon ourselves by our sins. 'Between our sins and their reward / We set the Passion of thy Son our Lord.'
How do we do this? Not by our own efforts, but by asking the Holy Spirit, the living Memory of the Church, to 'remember' - to make present and effective God's saving deeds. Because God is eternal, he relates to past and future events in just the same way as to events in the present. For this reason we can properly ask him to 'remember' past, present and future. When we ourselves celebrate an event we remember it with an intensity which makes the thing remembered real to us in the present, and inspires in us great thankfulness and joy. In the Eucharist it is God who is doing the remembering, and thus making present and effective Christ's saving acts. For God, Christ's actions at the Last Supper, His sacrifice on the Cross, and the Eucharist we celebrate, are all living events in which, through his mercy, we share. And because that Supper, the culmination of a series of meals which Jesus notoriously shared with sinners and outcasts, included the disciples who denied, betrayed and deserted him, so we can recognize the Eucharist as the celebration of our redemption, where sinners are made welcome and gathered in to share in the fruits of Christ's redeeming sacrifice.
Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, such as we have just observed in the feast of Corpus Christi, is intensified in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which we recognize and do our best to respond to Christ's Eucharistic love for us. It is a more warm-hearted and ardent devotion towards Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament which may be kindled in us as we recognize the extreme love He shows us in this Sacrament, and come to realize the extreme vulnerability with which He makes himself available to us; by penitence and adoration we can try to make up in some very small way not only for our own failures as to reverence and gratitude, but for the callousness and thanklessness of a fallen world.
Jill Pinnock
Source: Ebbsfleet Extra June 2008
'You are not your own: you were bought with a price,' wrote St Paul to the people of Corinth, and it is this purchase of ourselves that we celebrate in the Holy Eucharist. The word 'redeem' is often trivialized in common speech, and we need to remember that our redemption is a matter of the extreme pain, degradation and death suffered by Our Blessed Lord in His Passion; they are set against the death of the soul and the self-destruction which we bring upon ourselves by our sins. 'Between our sins and their reward / We set the Passion of thy Son our Lord.'
How do we do this? Not by our own efforts, but by asking the Holy Spirit, the living Memory of the Church, to 'remember' - to make present and effective God's saving deeds. Because God is eternal, he relates to past and future events in just the same way as to events in the present. For this reason we can properly ask him to 'remember' past, present and future. When we ourselves celebrate an event we remember it with an intensity which makes the thing remembered real to us in the present, and inspires in us great thankfulness and joy. In the Eucharist it is God who is doing the remembering, and thus making present and effective Christ's saving acts. For God, Christ's actions at the Last Supper, His sacrifice on the Cross, and the Eucharist we celebrate, are all living events in which, through his mercy, we share. And because that Supper, the culmination of a series of meals which Jesus notoriously shared with sinners and outcasts, included the disciples who denied, betrayed and deserted him, so we can recognize the Eucharist as the celebration of our redemption, where sinners are made welcome and gathered in to share in the fruits of Christ's redeeming sacrifice.
Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, such as we have just observed in the feast of Corpus Christi, is intensified in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which we recognize and do our best to respond to Christ's Eucharistic love for us. It is a more warm-hearted and ardent devotion towards Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament which may be kindled in us as we recognize the extreme love He shows us in this Sacrament, and come to realize the extreme vulnerability with which He makes himself available to us; by penitence and adoration we can try to make up in some very small way not only for our own failures as to reverence and gratitude, but for the callousness and thanklessness of a fallen world.
Jill Pinnock
Source: Ebbsfleet Extra June 2008